Pick up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. And a lot of people, people he cares about, are counting on him.

Creating an animated texture for games like Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 or any other source game isn't difficult at all. Just follow this tutorial, and you'll be able to make your own animated textures with ease.

The following programs I'll be using won't cost you anything. You can download them for free from these links below.

You can either use GIF Splitter for short animations, or Virtual Dub for long animations. If you're using a video clip for your animation, save it as an "Image sequence" and make sure it plays at 30 FPS (Frames Per Second).

Here, I've picked a swirling animation, and now I'm going to split the animation and place a folder on my desktop with every picture that's been split.

Step 2 - Changing the image format

If you open up the folder, you'll see the images named "IMG00000", "IMG00001", etc. You'll need to edit these pictures using Paint.NET, Photoshop, GIMP or any other graphics editing program you prefer to use that supports the TGA format.

Not much editing is required, you only need to change the image format. If you want to resize the image, that's up to you.

Make sure you save the images in a TGA. format with these settings shown below.
Keep the images uncompressed with a 32-bit depth, otherwise it won't work.

Make sure you keep the image names in order, like this.

When you're done, open up VTFEdit and we'll start creating your new texture.

Step 3 - Loading your saved images into VTFEdit

Click on "File", "Import" and copy the images that you've made. To select more than one texture, just hold down "Ctrl".

When you've imported the images, this window will open:

Make sure that you apply these settings but, you can change the Width and Height depending on how big your animation is. When you're done, click "OK". "Advanced" and "Resources" arn't important.

You'll see your animation in the main window. If you click on "Play" your animation will be previewed, don't worry if it plays too fast, that's normal. It will preview every frame you've added.

Before saving your animated texture, make sure that "Auto Create VMT File" is enabled. To do this, just click on "Options" and enable it. We'll be adding some code to the VMT file to make the texture animate.